NINETEEN

Lemons, Laundry and French Tobacco

I’ve fallen in love twice in my life. Both times it has been at first sight, in an instant. When I fell in love for the first time, I was 21 years old and my career was going well. I’d just finished a six–month TV series for Granada and I was repeatedly being asked to do musical theatre. But I had in mind a different path. I wanted to learn about Shakespeare, Chekov and Ibsen – in fact, all classical theatre – and so I signed a contract with The Prospect Theatre Company to do a new play about Dr. Johnson, James Boswell and Mrs Thrale called “Boswell’s Life of Johnson” (I was to play Fanny Burney and double the role of Louisa, a mistress of James Boswell). There was another play called “Thieves Carnival” by Jean Anouilh (in which I was to play the ingénue). The cast included Timothy West, Julian Glover, Martin Potter, Sylvia Sims and James Aubrey. I confess I hadn’t heard of any of them, except Sylvia Sims, a bit of a heroine with her blonde hair, good bones and blue eyes – I remembered “Ice-Cold in Alex” and how simply lovely she was.

We assembled in a rehearsal room in Victoria on the 22nd May 1966. May had been hot, everyone was tanned and in shirt-sleeves and cotton blouses. I was nervous meeting “proper” actors, not that the actors I had worked with before weren’t “proper”, but these ones felt high poweredly classical.

A tall, rather gangling man came through the door. He was blond with a determined chin and a roguish smile. He stood in the doorway waving greetings to Tim and to Toby Robertson, our director. The sun shone on his blond hair and made it seem to glow. He was wearing a French workman’s blue denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up and jeans and a navy blue cashmere jumper slung round his waist. We shook hands and when he looked at me, something happened to my legs. I gradually became aware of the scent of him, lemons and freshly laundered shirts and a whiff of French tobacco. This was Julian and I will never forget that moment.

Julian came with baggage though. Being ten years older than me and newly divorced from his wife of nine years, Eileen Atkins, some of the baggage was heavy and would cause me a bit of anguish in the months to come. Not only had he been married to Eileen, but he had left her to have a relationship with Sarah Miles, a beautiful, wild and unpredictable 60s icon. Although the bruises from these break-ups didn’t show, they were there under his skin, close to his heart and he felt them. How could I possibly enter the frame with a brilliant actress (Eileen had just won the Evening Standard Award for “The Killing of Sister George”) and a beautiful movie star – for I knew in that instant that my heart no longer belonged to just me. It was being stealthily and invisibly lassoed by this man in the denim shirt and however hard my head tried to convince my heart to slow down, it floated away – all caution thrown into the shafts of sunlight in the doorway on that hot May morning.

I’d always said that I had to marry a man whose voice was strong, mellow, rich and low – although I’m not sure I specified the qualities when I was ten years old. I just knew my husband had to have a good voice; good voices mattered. So often handsome men have been spoilt by high pitched or sibilant sounding voices; their masculinity reduced to Minnie Mouse squeakiness, rendering them, to my ears, a bit ridiculous.

Julian

I remember doing a film in Glasgow and standing in the lunch queue behind a huge 6’ 6” red-haired highlander with bursting biceps and a red beard of spectacular effulgence. A Viking, a formidable fighter at Culloden, was the character he presented. He had hands the size of tractor tyres and arms that had clearly tossed many cabers. It was his turn to step up to the serving hatch of the catering van to be asked by the caterers what he wanted for his lunch. His voice, falsetto, as if he had just inhaled helium, came back with, “Have ye any cheese toasties?” It was a struggle not to laugh. I’ve always been disconcerted by high pitched voices in both men and women and won over by deep, rich melodious tones. Julian’s voice had all the qualities I liked. I just knew I wanted to listen to him all the time.

It was a scary thing falling in love with Julian. For as well as delight, he would bring me quite a lot of unsettling anxiety. We started living together in secret. I stayed every night in his studio flat at the top of a Victorian house in Fulham and beetled back to my flat in Kensington to change, shower and be there in case the phone rang and it was my parents. The uncertainty Julian brought me was my own insecurity. He was experienced and bright and he was married, for God’s sake, when I was still at primary school. I did unforgivable things – I steamed open Eileen’s letters to him that she had written from New York and I remember once jumping off a bus to follow her into Mary Quant’s shop – Bazaar – in Knightsbridge. Just to see her – her skin and hair, watch her blink and breathe – here was Eileen, Julian’s still-married-to-wife and I had turned into her stalker for five minutes. She was unaware of me, but I was in anguish, my insecurity not allowing me in any way to measure up to her. How could he want to be with me? I was quite pretty (a word I was beginning to despise, it felt so insipid somehow), but I was young and I was afraid of her. It didn’t occur to me that she could be alarmed by me. She has since become a friend; I admire her work hugely. She is very funny and she has shown generosity to my son and therefore to me.

After two years of tears and fears, sun-wrapped days in France and in Deya, Majorca and drizzle-damp days in London, Julian asked me to marry him. He didn’t need to ask twice.

Julian is impulsive, enthusiastic and passionate, he is funny and warm with a sense of honour that some could consider quaint. He is also without envy, he is genuinely pleased when friends, even rivals, do well – if someone gets a part he has been up for and he thinks they are better for the role, he will admit, and mean it, that they deserve it. He even lacks schadenfreude, which can be quite annoying when I’m having a good old bitch about someone. He is loyal and kind, but he can be fantastically tactless. This springs from a curious innocence – he sometimes doesn’t think before he blurts out a remark he occasionally lives to regret. But because his heart is warm, people forgive him and laugh with him. Julian is well known for playing villains, but he is soft really, open and honest. Tough, he might appear, but his vulnerability is childlike and it tugs at my heart.

I remember in the first years we were together, I used to feel suffocated when we had to be apart; I felt as if I couldn’t breathe, and that hasn’t gone away. It was different from the choking feeling of the gundamulley bead in my throat that I experienced as a little girl. This was as if I couldn’t get enough air in; no amount of air was enough to fill the empty space in my chest. Yes, love makes you vulnerable and open to pain. Separations have become trying and frightening for both of us and we both dread, with silent, unspoken foreboding, the longest separation of all.

Julian and I married in September 1968 and we were to honeymoon in Bermuda. Well, that was the plan but it didn’t turn out quite like that. The Friday before our wedding, on 27th September, the Registrar from Chelsea Register Office rang us and said, “So, you have changed your mind about marrying on Saturday.”

“What do you mean we’ve changed our minds? No, we are flying to Bermuda on Sunday.”

“I’m afraid not. There must be, by law, one clear day between your divorce and your remarriage. To marry on Saturday, your divorce should have been registered on Thursday.” On registering his divorce from Eileen, Julian thought one clear day meant 24 hours. However, the Registrar was persuaded by my father’s soft Scottish voice and, I think, a small handful of notes, to marry us on the Sunday. So we had a wedding lunch on the Saturday at San Lorenzo in Beauchamp Place with close family and friends and then we went to our friends Miranda and Edward de Souza’s house in Barnes for a wedding reception. I wore my wedding ring, we cut the cake, toasts were made in champagne, Julian made a speech that made everyone cry – and we weren’t married at all. We had a secret private moment when we put the rings on each other’s fingers and vowed to love each other always. And we have. The reception was happy and sunny, the rain came out at the end of the day and caused rainbows – a tiger’s wedding on our wedding day. It seemed auspicious.

Julian and Isla’s wedding

We were officially married at Chelsea Register Office at 10.00 the following morning, Sunday, September 29th – my birthday. Very hung over. There was a very large sign with a pointing arrow to the “VD Clinic”. Not quite so auspicious. Our little wedding group is photographed looking remarkably cheerful, if a tad rough, bags under the eyes and hats askew. My beloved Mum and Dad are standing right behind me.

Only Fiona was missing, but we were soon to join her in the sunshine as we honeymooned in Bermuda, where she and her husband Chris were living. Riding our mopeds, sailing, swimming, fighting our way through the red land crabs as we made our way to the beach each morning for our swim. At night we would listen to the tree frogs and felt distressed when we saw a lot of them squashed on the roads in the morning. I liked the tree frogs and their night music. One evening there was a plop in Julian’s wine glass and a tiny frog appeared, really tiny, the size of my thumbnail, but with huge eyes and suckers on his feet. We fished him out and deposited him at the foot of a tree. I don’t know if he was too pissed to clamber up it. The other frogs kept on singing.

We saw a lot of Fiona and Chris and we had barbecues and beach parties and drank a lot of champagne and did quite a lot of the things you are expected to do on honeymoon. I found myself swimming through the turquoise ocean looking at my wedding ring through the water and marvelling that I was now Mrs Glover. I was married to Julian; I was no longer Isla Blair-Hill but Isla Glover. Suddenly I was part of a unit, I belonged, I was now more important to one other person than anyone else in his life. I was safe. I was home and I would never be lonely again.

We returned to London, Julian to do a television play; I was to start rehearsals for Nora in “A Doll’s House”. I was feeling a bit odd. Not ill, just odd. I knew I couldn’t be pregnant. Julian had told me when we met that he was unable to have children. When he and Eileen had failed to have any, they were both tested for fertility to find out that Julian was unlikely to father a child. It must have been a blow to him. But when we married I felt I’d rather be with Julian and not have children than have a child with anyone else. I was young and had no yearning as yet for children. We had never used any contraception. I decided secretly that I should have a pregnancy test. I met Julian at the front door when he arrived back from rehearsal with, “Hello, Daddy.” I shall never forget the look on his face.

I spent nine happy, utterly contented months before falling in love for the second time.